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Last year was my first trip to CES and frankly, I was disappointed. Everything had to do with 3D. 3D TV’s, 3D video games, 3D without glasses, 3D energy conservation appliances. I found this development disappointing and surprising for three reasons.

1. Our brains and eyes aren’t built for 3D.
2. It’s not a new technology.
3. Three is a good amount of reasons to have.

This year was a different story. I was amazed at the amount of practical technology that was being presented. Sure, there were still massive 3D displays (LG) but it felt more like a showroom floor where the theme is “we’ll make life better” as opposed to “isn’t this neat?”

"Cut the Rope" as arcade game. File under "Neat!"

Of course there was some opportunity to fall into each category. For example, TCL developed Dual Screen Television Technology. From one TV screen people can watch two different shows by wearing different glasses. Anyone who is married or shares a studio apartment (ew, seriously, find your own place) knows how useful this is. Now my wife can watch “Bridget Jones’s Diary” while I watch “Bridget Jones’s Diary 2: The Edge of Reason” from the same TV! (high five)

Food blogs, amirite?  Those magical web portals that lure you in with their tempting photos and delicious titles, and then trap you amongst their pages for hours on end.  Don’t pretend you don’t love them. If you can honestly say you don’t, you must only be looking at the worst ones, like Oat Bran Daily and Fun With Kale! (Turns out, 365 Days of Kale does exist, if you’re into that sort of thing.)  The problem here is that it is impossible to remain hung up on one bad blog when there are so many good ones begging too be looked at.  Far too many, actually.

The typical wasted hours spent food blog-hopping go a little something like this:

It was with a heavy heart that I joined team iPhone this summer. As a self-appointed Apple h8r, I spent the previous 3 years of my mobile phone life with Android devices. As with any relationship, there were good and bad times but at the end I realized that we needed to test the waters with others. I was not the least bit enthusiastic about this decision but it felt necessary at the time. Now that I’ve had a few months to adjust, I can say it was the right decision if not for one main factor…Instagram.

Quick, you’re late to Paris in 1906 and your go-to corset is still at the cleaners:  what do you do? It is precisely occasions like these that I regret anchoring the bulk of my wardrobe in the Muppets heyday circa 1979. So I get over it and go. After all, this is the meal that’s a solid year in the making.

It’s my trip to Next, Grant Achatz’s restaurant masterpiece. Achatz is Michael Jordan in the kitchen, augmented by a Shakespearean bout with tongue cancer, a story coming soon to theaters. He continues to floor diners with Alinea, consistently ranked one of the best restaurants in the world, and is now upping the ante with Next and it’s impending neighbor Aviary, a ballsy reimagination of the cocktail lounge.

There’s a lot of data out there about us. In fact, it’s easy to forget just how much information various companies and organizations (and the Internet in general) know about us. The first page of Reflecteur this week looks at the ways two separate sites used infographics to display a huge amount of information with very different results:

* Where Americans are Moving looks at 2008 IRS data to map county to county moves. It’s your one stop shop to US migratory information and it only takes a few minutes of playing with the maps to realize that there are a lot of stories hidden within this data. Just click on ‘Detroit’.
* Watch a Phone Company Stalk a Customer is, not surprisingly based on the title, far more disturbing. This site maps, via a video, all of the data a phone company in Germany gathered on one of their customers over 6 months. It seems more spy movie thriller than real life.

Travel over to Page 2 for a bit more fun: